Adamawa State-based American University of Nigeria (AUN) have built a solar oven and chicken tractor – a wood and electricity-free oven for the benefit of rural dwellers that depend solely on firewood for cooking.
Instead of felling trees and encouraging desert encroachment, the students decided to make use of the abundant sun in the state. The oven and chicken tractor were fabricated using a design first developed at a Kenyan refugee camp.
Working under the supervision of AUN’s former Director of Sustainability, Professor Charles Reith, Mr Rotimi Ogundijo and Mr. Matthew Abedoh, all of the Sustainability Unit of the university, the students used recycled cardboard, masking tape, glue and aluminium foil to construct the solar oven. Each oven took them about 45 minutes to construct and it cooks really fast.
The Chicken tractors were made from scrap metal and pieces of discarded chicken wire (poultry netting). A Chicken tractor is a screened-in box or portable bottomless cage or pen used by organic farmers to prepare soil for planting. The chickens are confined in the tractor and they eat all the weeds, bugs, scratch the soil and fertilize it with their guano or faeces (which is a highly effective fertilizer due to its exceptionally high content of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium essential for plant growth.) This is one of many ways organic growers fertilize their farms without using harmful and expensive chemicals.